First donation point report delivered, and recent updates to the system

Towards the end of May, we announced and launched our Donation Point system for mod authors to receive donations directly from Nexus Mods.

While we don't send Donation Points until 3 months after the end of the month (e.g. Donation Points generated in May won't be received by users until the beginning of September) we will provide a report at the start of each month to all opted-in users, for the previous month, that shows and explains the DP you should expect to receive in 3 months time, subject to any potential moderation issues. This report will show you the total amount of DP you should receive and then break that down further so you can see exactly what mods have produced what amount of DP. It will also show you the DP you've received from others sharing their DP with you.

May's report has been delayed a little while we work on some finishing touches, but it should now be finished and available for viewing for any opted in authors from their wallet page. Hopefully, from next month onwards, this report will be automatically generated and available to you within the first few working days of the month.

Some figures to reflect on

We launched the Donation Point system on the 22nd of May. Within the 10 days the donation system was operational in May, 2,674 mod authors opted in 10,955 of their mods to the Donation Points system.

For the first month, Nexus Mods has contributed $6,000 to the Donation Pool, which means there were 6,000,000 DP up for grabs in May. We intend to put $8,000 into the Donation Pool for the coming month.

Between the 10,955 files that were opted in, there were 5,289,062 unique downloads, which means each unique download in the month of May will be worth ~1.13 DP.

Of the 2,674 mod authors who have opted in, 129 will receive 10,000 DP ($10) or more, 255 will receive $5 or more and 709 mod authors will receive 1,000 DP ($1) or more.

Bethesda owned games accounted for 93% of the Donation Points distribution, despite the fact total download stats (and not just opted in stats) show more of an 85/15 split for downloads between Bethesda and non-Bethesda games on Nexus Mods. This disparity is simply because not as many mod authors from other games have opted in their mods.

While Bethesda games have been our bread and butter for almost 17 years, I am very keen to foster the entire PC modding community and not just Bethesda games. I am going to reflect on what we can do to balance that out a little and ensure games other than Bethesda games receive an adequate amount of donation funding that is more reflective of their worth both to users of the site, and to Nexus Mods, in the interests of encouraging our community past just Bethesda games. More than likely, this is going to mean simply creating a separate, and much smaller top-up pool for non-Bethesda games that takes nothing away from the main pool (e.g. an additional $500 set aside each month for non-Bethesda games). Ergo costing us a bit more, but I believe we can stretch to it so we do a little better by our non-Bethesda mod authors as well.

I'll have a think about it, review the next couple of month's figures, and see what I can do on that front.

Share directly with charities no matter how much you receive

Before the first Donation Points get delivered in September we'll be making some changes to our DP store (and adding more items to it). However, in the meantime, we've made a rather big change to the opt-in system.

You can now directly donate some (or all) of your DP, on a per-file basis, to one or more of the charities we have selected. At the end of each month, we'll tally up the Donation Points each charity has received and then donate the dollar equivalent to that charity. We'll likely open up these stats somewhere on the site so everyone can see how much is getting donated to charity.

The idea here is that there are going to be a not insignificant percentage of mod authors who only receive a small number of unique downloads each month and who might never actually reach the $10 minimum payout we have on the store. However, we can make the DP these less popular files receive still have some significance by allowing them to be pooled together for a number of good causes.

We'll continue to improve on this and we will change the charity system in our store so you can donate any number of DP, starting from just 1 DP, instead of having to wait until you have 10,000 DP. Thus, even if you're not sharing your DP directly with charities and you don't want to give 10,000 DP, you can give whatever you can or want and it will still make a difference when pooled with everyone else's donated DP. Donated Donation Points. Classic.

Fixes to permissions and you can now see what mods are opted in

We have now added some additional text to the "Permissions and credits" section of a mod page that will tell you whether a mod has opted into the Donation Points system. Mod authors need to be able to see and know if other mod authors have opted mods into the system to ensure any permissions or rights issues are being kept to and followed as necessary. This is necessary for us, and other mod authors, to properly moderate the system and is therefore non-negotiable. We will not remove this notification and there is no option to do so on your end.

A few mod authors reported some oddities with the opt-in permissions that you can set for allowing the use of DP, and that should now be cleared up and a bit more logical. Let us know if it still needs some tweaking.

I'm also pretty sure my DP have gone down by around 20% since the report came out. Judging by my mod stats and the unique downloads count in the report, the examined time interval must go back by at least as far as May 5th.

I hope Dark0ne or someone else can explain it a little better. 5000 dp may not sound like much, but thats $60 or so over the course of a year. I am a pensioner (disability) and a single dad of 3. You would be amazed how helpful $60 is to my family (especially if it's $60 US).

Thanks for the update. Well my mod is 6 years old now - so it's expected to see a decline from month to month. I am not asking for the 5000dp back, as I understand it was just a bug. :)

Shame I am not really well enough to update it further or make another mod. If only my 2 million or so unique downloads over the 6 years would have counted for anything, but I cannot complain. This Nexus community saved my life and im not just talking about money.

Sooo... donation points...Well, i was ... wary and i'm still quite a bit. Because thats what i'm always, when we talk about stuff like that. Always looking for the negative points.Right now, it seems like, there are none. Except the old topics... someone stole my mod... etc. Theft may increase overtime but i trust you guys to handle that well as always.

I was surprised, i must say, when i saw my reward for may. Never have thought, that i would get anything. Its really nice to see something return.(Except of donations, of kind users)Modding & money was never a topic for me and never will. Even without anything in return, i'll do what i love, modding and support the community. The nexus is the first site for me to check when i wake up and the last before i go to sleep.

Without further words and what i actually wanted to say, before i got lost in my thoughts,Thanks!

A very interesting system, however I was wondering, how does one know whether their content is being used in derivative submissions to generate donation points? What stops old mods that uses un-owned content from opting in the system?

uniques are based on every file on the mod page. So every updated file is a new set of downloads.

I have looked back for the source, and it was in the first MADS announcement topic.

The metric we are using is the unique download count for a user's mod pages as a whole. Note that this is different from the unique download counts for the individual files you can download from a mod page. For example, if you have 14 files available to download on a single mod page and a user downloads each of those files, your unique download counter is increased by 1, and not 14. I understand this is going to be contentious for some people, especially in regards to big mods that already have a multitude of unique downloads within the community, but unfortunately there are restrictions with our stat tracking that will not enable us to, for example, count all downloads from the start of this scheme as having been reset and "unique" from that point on.

@Nexusmods I play lots of the games you have on here but only Bethesda has made modding easy by providing the Creation Kit. While games like 7D2D, The Witcher, etc require you to learn much more time intensive and complicated ways of modding their games. - If the other games had mod authors as abundant as Bethesda, they would have just as much going toward them. I do not see why you should have to 'segregate' the games by Studio/popularity. It is not Bethesda's fault that they have several MAJOR title games (Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout, Doom) millions of people love and want to mod. Their games give us the tools to make mods for them, unlike other game devs that just give you the option to mod if you can figure out how. - Also Many of the game like Terraria, Sims, etc, have direct mod downloading from steam via their workshop, so almost no one wants to take the time to upload the mods on nexus, much less download them from nexus.- Starwars Knights: KotR and KotR 2 has a dedicated modding community with thousands of mods already, few MA still actively work on mods for that game and few are willing to moving their mods to nexus just to get points.- Sims: Well that is a series of games that has another modding community of its own.

You have hundreds of games, some very old, with a small mod base. Some popular but full of mostly cosmetic mods. I am sorry to say; but, Bethesda games seem to be the majority of your mod base simply because NEXUS has ALWAYS been the go to place for Bethesda games. And the fact that you allow 'adult' mods, which was not always the case, even Lovers lab is not as popular as nexus.

In the end, I guess it does not matter. We make mods because we like doing it, so i guess the points being segregated by game studio does not really matter

Maybe they just realized that introducing a clear popularity based support only reinforces monopoly. As you have mentioned, it is more difficult to make mods for non-Bethesda games. I agree, I have modded Morrowind before I had internet connection. Moreover, this system gives non-Bethesda modders a way lower quantified recognition what can be achived with the same or less amount of labour by modding Bethesda games, simply because of their significantly higher player/mod rate. And people usually moves toward things that gives them more positive feedback. Sorry for my english. I have no energy to learn it, being depleted by the cumbersome modding tools of Mount&Blade. :D

it is not a popularity support model but simply a majority rules effect. If you have 90% of mods on Bethesda you also have a much larger % of those mods dividing the point among them. Bethesda's Fallout 4 has 24139 mod, New Vegas 18968, Fallout 3 14605 , skyrim 56915 and SE 12158, Oblivion 28611. I am not including Morrowind or Doom which add only ~ 6k more. (Total 98, 481) This is why the Beth games dominate the mod list.They have 3-30+ times the number of mod of any game on this website. Bethesda Know how to make people play their games and that is to allow people to mod it from their liking. On average 90% of players from one of those games has their mod load maxxed (about 255+ mods before merge patches.)

you do the math; of the 257,444 mods on nexus, Beth games own almost 100k. And as such, of those 100k we have only a portion opted in. If even 5-8% of that opted in, beth would still own 90% of that pool at about 5-8k mods. As the post stated 10,955 mod were opted in, and Beth was 93% of the opted in mods. see what i mean.========================================@Dark0neIf the pool is $6,000 and you remove Beth games from the equation, The $$$ going to the less common game mods would mean the mod authors would get hundreds of dollars instead of $1-50 for the current setup.

But with that said, you might be right after all. I had no idea Beth took about 50% of the total mods on this site. Though, I do not think Nexus needs to add more funds to the pool for the non beth mods. In Fact you know the numbers of Beth to non-Beth mods as stated in the post; so why not set the pool to x% for non beth games based on the ratio you stated. So, the $6000 would be (15%)$900 for non-Beth games and (85%)$5100 to Beth games. It would make fair and reasonable sense to split the funds.

Though going forward it would only be fair to further divide the funds to all games base on their ratio.

I can't argue with the second part of your comment, so it is addressed to the pre "======" part.I did not talk about the overall dominance of Bethesda games, I talked about the effect of Download/Upload ratios here.Take the example of Skyrim and Warband:Skyrim D/U: 1.4 bn/58k =~ 24138Warband D/U: 3,6M/1,1k =~ 3272So, Skyrim has a RELATIVE small!!! amount of mod uploads compared to the amount of its dowloaders/players here.It means every single Skyrim upload expects 7,3 times more DPs than a Warbad mod upload - and Warband is not the last game in the top-list.I do not know how many opted files are here and there, so my math assumes a similar inequality in Downloads/(MADS opt in) ratios between the two games.With the current 6000$ main pool, that + 500$ NB pool would give a +135% support for NB Mods at the moment, what is very kind, but really not an overcompensation, knowing their way higher scale of disadvantage in this environment. Moreover, by further increasing the main pool that percentage will become proportionaly lower.So, that +500$ balancing pool would be a nice gesture towards outlanders, nothing more.===============================================Dividing the funds to all games base on their ratio is a fair idea, and nothing that couldn't be automatized based on monthly data. True, it could cause gold rush among new games. I don't know if it would be good or bad on the long run (America had some in the past, and she is OK)Thinking rationaly, Nexus profits better from sharing pop game mods. Those attracts more players as potential victims of advertisement, or premium mebership subscribers. That's why a symbolically balanced popularity model is more feasible than a fair one. At least, Nexus has made it, and that's great! See what the future brings.

The Unique download and annon dl are all hard to quantify, simply because if a MA updates a mod, the new downloads will spike. This is also an issue with mods that need to be updated often to fix small bugs during the early stages.I would find it worrisome if someone wanted to 'Cheese' the numbers by updating the mod several times in a month just to make people download it more.